I thought it would be nice if those of us who, for any reason (prototyping, lack of knowledge, curiosity, etc...), have crashed or killed the Arduino board,dare to share our experiences in order to help others to avoid it.

well not kill at all but one time i make my owm play station control you know buttons and thumb joysticks.. and one wire broke and make a bypass (sorry i don´t know how to say when positive and negative touch together in english) what happend was a lot of current for the arduino regullator and heat so the protection open the circuitbut waiting for 5 hour the protection stay cool and arduino works again. its alive!!!!

And now when something doesn´t work i always thing may be is becouse i have broken the arduino the oder time.... but not normally doesn´t work becouse me.

It wasn't an arduino, but I just smoked a 1.5" lcd screen I bought from adafruit. I was trying to move it to the battery I was going to use in the project, and I smelled smoke, and now it is a very light weight paperweight. I have a larger 4" screen I can use, but the 1.5" screen was about the right size to attach to my glasses for a poor man's heads up display.

I killed a '328P on a duemilanove driving a NPN transistor with no base current limit resistor, and a couple of prominis with a dangling 12V line during debugging.All back in Fall 2010 when I was starting out making scoring machines. None since.

I did the same thing, but got lucky because the PS I was using could not supply enough current to fry things. That was with a mega2560, which is uses a surface mount CPU, so the whole thing would have been a rightoff. Bullet dodged. Lesson learned.

I haven't bricked one yet, but using a current limited power supply is always a good idea. If your project should only use a few mA you can set the limit very low, so that if there is a problem it just current limits instead of frying things.

I've had an Arudino die "for no reason"... Maybe static discharge? Actually, it's running OK, but it's running a usless program and I can't re-program it (bad bootloader or USB/serial?).

At work, I've fried a few (non-Arduino) boards by running a 5V board from 12V. The problem is, we have a customer that puts the board in a box with a barrel connector that matches our our 12V products.

We have 12V "wall wart" supplies all over the place and in the "heat of troubleshooting", when you are switching things around and re-connecting things, it's easy to make a "little" mistake. . Usually the RAM dies, and sometimes the CPU chip. (All of the other 5V chips on the board usually survive.) The CPU is in a socket, so that's no big deal. But but the RAM is soldered, so replacing it is a minor pain. (Of course we have plenty of parts in stock.)

well not kill at all but one time i make my owm play station control you know buttons and thumb joysticks.. and one wire broke and make a bypass (sorry i don´t know how to say when positive and negative touch together in english) what happend was a lot of current for the arduino regullator and heat so the protection open the circuitbut waiting for 5 hour the protection stay cool and arduino works again. its alive!!!!

And now when something doesn´t work i always thing may be is becouse i have broken the arduino the oder time.... but not normally doesn´t work becouse me.

I think the ploy fuse in this case saved your arduino when you shorted power with ground. That happens several times especially when I load up the wrong firmware to my setups. The poly fuse saved me many times. I have never damaged an arduino beyond repair but I will, given time

I think I recently fried pin 9 on my R3 by just plugging it directly into a small DC motor and ramping the speed up and down using PWM… does anyone happen to know what exactly I could have damaged, and if there is a way to fix it?

I think I recently fried pin 9 on my R3 by just plugging it directly into a small DC motor and ramping the speed up and down using PWM… does anyone happen to know what exactly I could have damaged, and if there is a way to fix it?

You damaged the ATMEGA328P-PU. Go get a new one with arduino bootloader.